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She came to me late, when I was tired, when the brew was thinning in me and it grew harder to keep the fox from rising, the borrowed hours running shorter than they should, as Rainthorn had feared. That was the danger she had warned me against. I was tired and stretched and nearer the edge than I had ever stood in front of anyone.

Unlike the ladies who had circled me all evening, she did not waste a word on the plainness of my gown. She studied me the way you price a thing, and what she was pricing, I understood without being told, was whether I was a problem.

“Another new face,” she said. Her accent was clipped, every word set down like a coin on a counter. “It is a wonder to me how this court breeds them. Every season a fresh crop of pretty girls from houses no one can quite place, all of them drifting toward the same centre.” She smiled coldly, and her eyes moved over me, and then dropped, for just a moment, to the plain silver pendant resting at my collarbone, and stayed there a beat longer than a glance, before they rose again to my face. “I make it my business to know which of them mean to be trouble. So you will forgive me if I ask it plainly. Lady Marenne, was it? Such an interesting name for a woman with the look of one who came a very long way searching for something she could not find in the backwater that bred her. It sits on you like a fever. They tell me you were raised in the tradition of the gods, so I cannot help but wonder what a temple girl could want here, badly enough to cross half an empire for it, when by every measure she should already have found everything a Marenne could ask for in the teaching of the gods. Did the temple lose its savour, that you had to come and offer yourself up to all of this—” she made a wide gesture, taking in the whole thinly veiled pretension of the room “—theatre?”

The floor opened under me. Her eyes had touched the pendant, and my heart slammed against my ribs, because I did want something very badly, and she had seen it, and for one cold instant I thought she knew, that somehow she knew all of it, the fox and the gate and the man I had crossed an empire for, and an unreasoning fear surged up through me and I felt the warmth at my chest flicker and start to fail.

Not in this room. Not in front of the whole court. Not three hours into the only chance I had left to reach him.

I went down into the still place. I breathed the way the monks had taught me, as Selene had drilled me through a dozen cruel nights, and I held the feeling down where it could not reach my shape, and I let none of it touch my face. I gave her a slow untroubled temple-bred smile with nothing under it at all.

“You are kind to take such an interest,” I said. “We are taught at the temple that the gods send us where we are needed, not where we would rather be. I came because I was sent, to study the rituals of the capital and carry them home. If that looks like fever to you, I think you must meet a great many anxious people in your work, and I am sorry the work has narrowed your sight so far that suspicion has become the only lens you have left to see the world through.” I let it sit, and let her make of it what she liked. “Which I imagine it must, for a woman with so great a deal resting on her shoulders.”

Something flickered behind the pale eyes, amusement, and a flash of appreciation for a riposte well delivered, and beneath both a small recalibration, the look of a hunter deciding a thing is not the prey she took it for. Or not yet. The hook had not caught. She inclined her head a precise quarter inch, the cold smile edged now with something almost like a smirk.

“Well, Lady Liora of House Marenne. May the temple girl in you find what she came looking for.” And she moved on, back toward the centre of the room, toward the business that had brought her south, and I stood with my heart slamming and my shape held by a thread and my face as still as the surface of a pond, and I did not turn into a fox in the middle of the emperor’s court.

But it had been close. Closer than it should have been, over nothing but a sharp woman’s questions and a single glance at a pendant she could not have known. I could feel the brew failing faster than we had planned for, my own shape slipping toward the edge at a few clipped sentences, and I understood, standing there, how thin the ground was that Rainthorn had warned me about. A candle in a high wind. Three hours of safety on a good night, and the good nights were running shorter with every passing day.

And worse than any of it, Drystan had not come. The whole long evening, beneath the composure and the smiling and the fear, I had been looking for him, scanning every entrance for the one face I had crossed everything to reach. Selene had told me he would not be there, and she was right, and still I had looked, because I could not help it, because every room I would enter for the rest of my life I would enter looking first for Drystan.

He had not come. But I had. Inside the court at last, received, a lady they would remember, a face they would let through doors. The slow road had taken its first step and I had walked it without falling. Tomorrow there would be another reception, and another after that, and somewhere up the long ladder of them was a room the emperor did attend, and I would be in it, and he would see me, and all of this would have been worth it.

That was what I thought about, going home on the arm of the minister’s wife, grimmer now than before, having watched her backwater charge trade words with the guest of honour and not lose. Drystan. The room where he would finally see me. A passing thought brushed the golden man by the window, who had knelt on a wet floor for a girl no one would miss and asked nothing of anyone, and I set him aside, the way you set aside a thing you have no place for.

I was here for Drystan. I had always been here for Drystan.

I told myself so the whole way home. And down in the dark, in the still place where I had learned to put the things I could not afford to feel, the small part of me that named me a traitor to him stayed stubbornly quiet.

Chapter 15

The dream came for me again on the night my delusion ended in the cruelest way it could, and this time I fought it.

I knew it now for what it was, or for what I had decided it was, a disloyalty, a sickness the brew bred in me, and when the bright water closed over me and the faceless man gathered me into the warmth that smelled of leather and clean soap, I did not let myself sink into the peace of it. I twisted against it. I told him, the way you tell a thing in a dream without words, that I did not want him, that my heart was Drystan’s, that he had no right to the ease he made in me. I fought the only good feeling I had left, because loving it felt like betraying the man I had crossed an empire for.

I woke fighting, and I woke as a fox.

The strong feeling had done it, the struggle against the dream, and I came up out of sleep small and four-legged on the cushion by the cold hearth, and I knew before I looked that the flask was empty. I had drained the last of it two nights before and Rainthorn had not yet brought more, the herbs harder to come by every time, and so there was no borrowed hour waiting for me. There was only the fox, and the long night, and the woman locked inside her with no way out.

The window stood open to the summer dark. A full moon hung over the palace, vast and white, and the night came in on the air, jasmine and cut grass and the green breath of the gardens, and Selene slept, and I could not. The grief of the dream still moved in me, the strange double grief of a peace I wanted and would not allow myself, and I could not lie still inside it.

So I went out.

I had learned, in the slow safe weeks, to wear the fox instead of only enduring it. I knew now what the body could do, where it could go, the gaps and the shadows and the high sills. As a woman I was a lower noble of a forgotten house, allowed into the lesser halls and nowhere near the heart of the palace. As a fox I could go anywhere small and quiet and unseen. I slipped out the open window and down into the gardens, and I went walking in the moonlight, because the night was beautiful and my heart was breaking over a dream and I did not know what else to do with myself.

* * *

The fox carried me where the woman could never have gone.

I went through a gap in a wall no person could have passed, and down a screened path the gardeners used, and under a gate barred to all but the highest of the court, into a part of the imperial garden I had glimpsed once before and never thought to enter. It was the private garden, the emperor’s own, and it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, a still dark pond under the moon, stone lanterns unlit, and over the water a single old plum tree heavy with late blossom, the petals pale as snow in the white light.

And beneath the plum tree, beside the water, sat Drystan.

I stopped where I stood, every hair along my spine lifting, my heart going so hard I thought the sound of it would carry across the water. He was alone. He sat on a stone bench at the pond’s edge with his forearms on his knees, looking into the dark water, and he did not see me, a small silver shape frozen at the garden’s edge in the shadow of the wall. He looked exactly as he had looked from the mezzanine, months and a lifetime ago. He looked like a man carrying something that had broken him.

Everything in me strained toward him, the same unbearable pull as the gallery rail, the need that had driven me across an empire. He was there. Twenty paces of moonlit garden and a sheet of still water, and he was there, and I was so close, and the wild thought rose in me that I could go to him now, as a fox, lay myself down at his feet, and somehow, somehow, he would know me. The pull was so strong I took a step.

And the garden gate opened, and a second figure came into the moonlight, and I froze where I stood.